Ever wonder how race, class, and education all play into the murder rate?
Of course you have.
They are such fun subjects to think about.
Balloons! Puppies! Chocolate Cake!

See, a few days ago, PC read this article written by her educational counterparts Mensah Dean and Val Russ. The story quoted Councilman Wilson Goode, Jr during a meeting with the School District Boss Paul Vallas.

Goode asked:

"The specific question that I'm asking... relates to young black males that starts with under-achievement, that leads toward high rates of dropouts, and it leads toward being murdered," Goode said. "I'm asking what your specific track record is with regards to young black males?"

Vallas responded to a reporter after the meeting and said:

"If [Goode] wanted to say we aren't where we should be, I would agree with him 100 percent," said Vallas. "But if he's also trying to make the point that we haven't made improvement, I would absolutely disagree. Our track record is better than the other large urban districts."

Jeez.
What away to beat around the issue. We understand this is a sensitive topic, but someone really needs to have the cojones to talk about how race, poor education, and class correlate to the city’s disgusting crime rate. This town is full of broke kids who never graduated high school and its about time someone spoke the truth.

Wait...
Someone sorta did.
Uh-oh.
They are all the way in Kansas.

Doesn't matter. 'Cause what Kansas found is spelled out in this wonder New York Times Magazine cover story on the truth behind the numbers, and it hits home. Hard.
The story is about the success of No Child Left Behind – another fabulous legacy of President Bush — along with how race and class determine a child’s academic success before they enter grade school.

You gotta read it man. You gotta.

Here is an excerpt:

Researchers began peering deep into American homes, studying up close the interactions between parents and children. The first scholars to emerge with a specific culprit in hand were Betty Hart and Todd R. Risley, child psychologists at the University of Kansas, who in 1995 published the results of an intensive research project on language acquisition. Ten years earlier, they recruited 42 families with newborn children in Kansas City, and for the following three years they visited each family once a month, recording absolutely everything that occurred between the child and the parent or parents. The researchers then transcribed each encounter and analyzed each child's language development and each parent's communication style. They found, first, that vocabulary growth differed sharply by class and that the gap between the classes opened early. By age 3, children whose parents were professionals had vocabularies of about 1,100 words, and children whose parents were on welfare had vocabularies of about 525 words. The children's I.Q.'s correlated closely to their vocabularies. The average I.Q. among the professional children was 117, and the welfare children had an average I.Q. of 79.

This is just a sample of the shock and awe in this story for all you sociology-types (we rock, dont we?)
Find this story and read it!